Kathleen Gomes – Memphis Flyer

We are now less than a month away from August 7th, when the final votes in the Shelby County general election and state and federal primaries will be counted, and distinct patterns are taking shape.

Those races that were expected to be the most closely watched ones at the beginning of the election season — for the 9th District congressional seat, for Shelby County Mayor, for District Attorney General, for the District 29 state Senate seat, and for Juvenile Court Judge and Juvenile Court Clerk, among others — continue to command attention.

Although several circumstances — including charges and counter-charges, endorsements, demographics, and the like — are potentially influencing voter reactions, one factor that cannot be overlooked is the perennial one of money. Some candidates have it in spades, while others are struggling.

A word of caution: Lest it be forgotten, two candidates in the May 6th primaries for county offices — Kenneth Whalum, running for the Democratic nomination for County Mayor, and Martavius Jones, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the District 10 County Commission seat — nearly won races against highly favored opponents with more visible campaigns and vastly more funding.

Credit those outcomes to the power of name recognition, which remains a major factor in the current scene.

For what it’s worth, however, here are three examples:

• City Councilman Lee Harris, who is campaigning aggressively in his Democratic primary effort to unseat District 29 state Senator Ophelia Ford, garnering endorsements by the bushel and across the political board, is also raising disproportionate amounts of money — he boasts a 10-to-1 ratio over Ford’s in the reporting quarter ending June 30th. (His edge in money on hand is somewhat lesser — $28,646.29 to $11,549.66, a shade less than 3-to-1).

• Incumbent Republican County Mayor Mark Luttrell, whose ads have been omnipresent on TV of late, has a marked financial advantage over Democratic nominee Deidre Malone, with a reported $132,417 on hand as of the June 30th report, against $38,915.

• Rather famously, the Democrats’ nominee for District Attorney General, Joe Brown, whose colleagues on the party ticket were counting on him for help, both from the luster of his “Judge Joe Brown” TV fame and from his bankroll, has hit snags in both respects and reports only $745 on hand as of June 30th, compared to $269,227 for his opponent, Republican incumbent D.A. Amy Weirich.

In all three of these cases, the financial underdog is seeking a tactical edge elsewhere.

Ford had her first public event last week, a fund raiser/meet-and-greet at the funeral home of brother Edmond Ford on Elvis Presley Boulevard, gathering around her not only numerous members of the still powerful Ford extended family but supporters from elsewhere on the political spectrum, notably GOP County Commissioner Terry Roland, her former opponent in a 2005 special election.

Malone continued with a series of events targeting various components of the Shelby County body politic — meeting, for example, with a group of women’s rights advocates on Saturday at Pyro’s Pizza on Union, and contrasting her strong pro-choice stance with what she described as positions on Luttrell’s part that were ambivalent at best, particularly in his having chosen to disenfranchise Planned Parenthood in 2011 as the county’s partner in employed Title X federal funding for women’s health.

Brown, meanwhile, was working the grass roots, especially in the inner city, with his “Law and Order Tour” with sidekick Bennie Cobb, the Democratic nominee for Sheriff. He presided over an event last week at the Central Train Station downtown and made appearances at forums, like one held at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church on Sunday, where he continued to levy attacks on Weirich, blaming her for negligence in the matter of the much-discussed rape-kit backlog and questioning her use of federal and state funding.

• Early voting for the August 7th elections begins this Friday, July 18th, at the Shelby County Election Commission’s downtown location, and will continue there and, from Monday, July 21st, at 21 satellite voting sites until Saturday, August 2nd. (The locations of the satellite sites will be posted at memphisflyer.com.)

• In the wake of several meetings of the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee hashing out disputes over the party’s endorsement of judicial candidates but leaving them intact, a group of Democratic lawyers, including former party chairmen David Cocke and Van Turner, is issuing its own ballot — including judges left off the party endorsement list whom they deem deserving.

These include Probate Court Judge Kathleen Gomes, Criminal Court Judge Mark Ward, and General Sessions Judges Bill Anderson, Phyllis Gardner, and John Donald, among others.

• The first fully separate cattle call for Board candidates took place Monday night at the First Baptist Church on Broad under the joint sponsorship of several ad hoc education organizations.

Present and accounted for were Chris Caldwell and Freda Garner-Williams in District 1; Stephanie Love in District 3; David Winston in District 5; Shante K. Avant in District 6; Miska Clay Bibbs in District 7; and Roshun Austin, Mike Kernell, and Damon Curry Morris in District 9.

Absent from the event, which took place during an off-and-on thunderstorm, were Teddy King and Anthony D. Lockhart in District 3; Scott McCormick in District 5; Jimmy L. Warren in District 6; and William E. Orgel in District 8.

The format called for each candidate to make an introductory statement and field one question from the moderator, Daarel Burnette II of the education periodical Chalkbeat Tennessee subbing for Keith Norman, the church pastor, who was absent. Though Burnette’s question was the same for each candidate, having to do with the candidate’s foremost objective as a prospective board member, there was a fair amount of variety in the answers elicited, most of them sensible and well informed, concerning issues ranging from curriculum to parent-teacher relations.

A final round of questions was solicited from the audience. Fielding a question about the desirability of separating “politics” from education, Kernell, a longtime state representative from southeast Memphis, was unique in embracing that inevitable pairing, saying that his experience and entrée with the state legislature could have positive results for his district and Shelby County Schools (SCS).

The nine-member SCS board being elected in this year’s school board elections from the city of Memphis and unincorporated areas of Shelby County replaces the provisional seven-member board, which was elected from the whole of Shelby County.

One of the members of the outgoing seven-member board, David Reaves of Bartlett, was an interested spectator Monday night, chatting amiably before the event with several of his current Board colleagues who were taking part in the forum. Reaves is now a County Commissioner-elect and will be swapping chairs in September.

Monday night’s event took place under the auspices of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Ad hoc co-sponsors included representatives of Students First, Stand for Children, and the aforesaid Chalkbeat Tennessee.

The auditorium of the Vasco Smith county building was full, as it normally is when there’s a controversy to be resolved or an appointment to be competed for. In the case of the Shelby County Commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, both conditions pertained.

Given that most of the attendees were on hand to boost the chances of one of three candidates to fill a Probate Court vacancy (and most of those to support candidate Kathleen Gomes), someone suggested leapfrogging down the commission’s agenda to Item 19, the court appointment of an interim judge to replace retiring judge Robert Benham.

The candidates, all lawyers, were Gomes, who boasted many years’ experience trying cases in Probate Court; state senator Jim Kyle, who heads the diminished band of Democrats in the state Senate; and former Shelby County commissioner Julian Bolton.

Gomes was nominated by Heidi Shafer, Kyle by Sidney Chism, and Bolton by Walter Bailey. As befitted the turnout on her behalf, Gomes had the most testimonies by audience members. Bolton’s mother and sister spoke on his behalf. Kyle spoke to his “30 years making decisions in the public realm” and his “ability to work with everybody.”

Commissioners also toasted their favorites. Chris Thomas noted that he himself was a Republican while Gomes was a Democrat and touted that fact as proof that his preference had nothing to do with politics. The claim generated a laugh line when Chairman Mike Ritz, also a GOP member but one increasingly inattentive to the party line, said straight-facedly to the more avowedly partisan Thomas, “Oh, you’re a Republican?”

In speaking for Kyle, Commissioner Terry Roland also made the claim that his choice was above politics. All the candidates were “equally qualified,” said Roland, but, “Me and this gentleman [Kyle], we go way back … [pause] to Ophelia Ford days.” That was a reference to the Senate’s consideration of a contested special state Senate election in 2005, one eventually resolved in favor of Democrat Ford and against Republican Roland.

Roland said Kyle had not “done right” by him then. But since? “I’ve got to know his heart … have come to respect this gentleman, immensely. I’m throwing my support to Jim Kyle.”

As was fairly well known before Monday’s meeting, and was explicitly volunteered by Roland in a conversation before the meeting, Tennessee lieutenant governor Ron Ramsey, the state Senate speaker and a staunchly conservative Republican, had endorsed Democrat Kyle and had made a point of communicating the fact.

It was less well known, except in Democratic Party circles, that something of an understanding — or at least a hope — existed that Kyle’s Senate seat, if vacated, might be awarded by the commission at some point to former state senator Beverly Marrero, who was defeated in last year’s Democratic primary by Kyle in the district they both shared after GOP-controlled redistricting.

The Senate-appointment issue, in any case, was the source of a sore spot that developed during the voting. After the first ballot, Kyle had six of the seven votes needed, Gomes had four, and Bolton had two. Bailey, who had committed to Bolton on the first ballot in homage to his ex-colleague, quickly announced he was switching his vote to Kyle, giving him seven votes and, for the space of a few seconds, making him the apparent probate judge-designate.

Then occurred what is surely the most awkward and potentially embarrassing moment in the commission career of Democrat Steve Mulroy, a Kyle voter on the first ballot. Immediately upon Bailey’s switch, Mulroy announced his own. Instead of voting for Kyle, he would pass.

Mulroy later said that he had made no promises to Kyle and had voted for him on the first ballot as a courtesy but had always anticipated voting for Gomes in what he expected would be some subsequent ballot. Whatever Mulroy’s motives, his action was, to say the least, an eyebrow-raiser, and he had best not be expecting a place on Kyle’s Christmas card list this year.

This was the second time in a two-year span that Kyle had suffered a sudden reverse at the hands of a fellow Democrat on the commission. In 2011, he had applied for the position of interim member of the Unified School Board, just then being appointed by the commission, and was within a vote of victory when Democrat Justin Ford decided to cast his vote for Republican Kevin Woods, Kyle’s opponent and, thereby, the victor.

It should be noted that Mulroy was not the only Democrat ultimately recorded as voting for Gomes. So were Melvin Burgess and Henri Brooks.

• Brooks would figure as one of the principals in another surprising development Monday, and this one, too, had some importance. This was regarding a resolution authorizing the payment of some $103,889.28 to the lawyers engaged by the commission to litigate the ongoing school-merger controversy. This is the kind of vote that normally, with all 13 members voting, gets an 8-5 outcome, with the supporters of school merger in the majority and opponents, mainly suburban members who support municipal school districts, in the minority.

This time the resolution failed, however, getting only six of the seven votes needed for passage. The vote was taken in the immediate aftermath of a philippic made by Brooks against Chairman Ritz, a merger supporter, whom she accused of speaking to her rudely. Whether for that reason or some other, Brooks abstained from voting. And Democrat Bailey, another merger supporter, was temporarily out of the chamber.

Presumably, the commission will have opportunities to vote again on the matter at a subsequent meeting.

• The other major development at Monday’s meeting was the commission’s vote, by the aforesaid 8-5 margin — seven Democrats plus Ritz versus five Republicans — to approve an ordinance, on third and final reading, to exempt from Shelby County residence requirements all of the erstwhile Memphis City Schools teachers coming into the new county system via merger.

Another ordinance, proposed by Millington’s Roland, a vehement foe of merger, would have authorized a referendum on the issue of revising the county charter so as to eliminate the residency requirements for all county employees. To reject this ordinance after passing the preceding one would be “hypocrisy,” said Roland, who went on to say, “I know a lot of people in Nashville. Surely you wouldn’t want the legislature to see this.”

When his proposal went down 8-5 (though with a different mix of ayes and nays than usual), Roland, who has taken to suggesting with increasing intensity and frequency that he, in effect, sits at the right hand of Ron Ramsey, thundered that the legislature might be brought to overrule the commission’s previous vote to enlarge the permanent Unified School Board from seven to 13.

• The Tennessee General Assembly was, however, moving quickly toward a scheduled mid-April adjournment, and, though school legislation favored by Shelby County’s suburban municipalities — bills to enable municipal schools and private-school vouchers, among others — still had some hoops to pass through, they seemed headed toward final passage this week or next.

In a longish chat with reporters last week, Ramsey made the case for the legislature’s current pell-mell progress toward adjournment as a matter of recovering what had once been the norm. Ramsey also strongly advocated legislation, now scheduled for consideration in the assembly’s final week, that would allow the nomination of U.S. Senate candidates by party caucuses in the legislature rather than, as at present, in open public primaries.